Absolute Swamp Thing by Alan Moore Vol. 1

Love the artwork. Of course, this is the first time I'm reading this Swamp Thing so I don't miss the original coloring. Sawn binding. Nice Eye. Worth every cent.

Some have complained about the new coloring.I love it. The slightly oversized pages and the thick paper made my rereading of this classic so much more meaningful.I bought the original comics as they came out (and foolishly sold them on eBay several years ago). But this edition--and the other two volumes--have made my loss of the floppies much more bearable. I've really enjoyed going back into Moore's world. The art is exquisite. This is a great absolute series.If you've never read these books--do it now.

I have to admit that DC was honest in the product description when they wrote, “brand-new coloring.” They question is, why?My review was going to be all about my love for the 1984 Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing and how it was a perfect marriage between art and writing. I bought these comics when they were first released, and they made a profound impact on me in my teenage years. I wanted to talk about how Stephen Bissette and John Totleben were perhaps the first artists where, for me, their names became synonymous with the series they worked on. I was always disappointed when an issue was released without their art, but I understood given the detail of Bissette’s penciling and Totleben’s inking. Unfortunately, DC made one disastrous decision in this Absolute Edition.I’m not one of those purists who thinks that every reprint should look exactly like the original. It makes sense that a more expensive version is going to have superior paper, printing techniques and modern tools so things are going to look different, and hopefully better. In fact, if the Absolute Edition looked like a scan of the original, I’d be complaining. The problem here is that DC looked at the colors supplied by Tatjana Wood and decided they could do better. Issue 30 opens with, “The returned man smiles” as the lips of a green skinned alien part. Wait, what? That’s supposed to be Matt Cable and in the original his skin is flesh colored. It was a great moment in the original comic but now it looks distractingly weird. It was as if DC decided that the comic was too gothic and gritty and decided to give it a more disco appearance.Scarcely a page goes by without radical color shifts. Pages that have greens and blue are now purple and grey. The last panel of issue 25 shows an image of Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason’ in all red. Now, it’s shades of purple. Did that improve it? Nope. Page after page is altered and the worst thing is, these new colors are more often than not, softening Totleben’s inking. His inking was sharp and frightening and now it’s soft and friendly. The monkey king was original black and white but now has shades of grey. Is he more frightening? No. Sometimes colors are added such as giving Swamp Thing an orange tongue where it was originally green. Sometimes images have a single color where there used to be multiple colors and details are lost. I know that Alan Moore gets 98% of the credit for this run but it was a collaborative effort. Tatjana Wood isn’t even given coloring credit. She’s listed as the original comic colorist, but coloring credit goes to Steve Oliff and ‘Olyoptics’. Oliff is an award winning colorist and a veteran in the industry but radically changing the colors is akin to changing Alan Moore’s text. If the recoloring improved the visuals I would be forgiving but the changes are almost always either gratuitous or make the visuals worse. BTW: Even the covers are recolored and it is just as much of a disaster. Issue 21 has Swamp Thing menacing General Sunderland as light from a window illuminates the terrified man. In the recoloring, the light seems to fall across Swamp Thing but based on where the light is coming from it doesn’t make sense and the light hits his body flat as if he were two dimensional. My assumption is that this was just a coloring screw up. Nice job.This was not the review I wanted to write. I wanted to talk about my love of Swamp Thing and how DC finally produced a high-quality compilation of one of their greatest comics ever. I often roll my eyes when reviewers nitpick details in reproductions as if they were just itching to complain. I’m sure Steve Oliff spent a lot of time on recoloring and it looks like volume 2 of Absolute Swamp Thing will be getting the same treatment. I just feel that when you have a series that comes this close to perfection that no one has a right to decide they can improve it and I would have to assume this was an editorial decision from DC.The Absolute Edition has a very neat, soft, moss like cover and some really good extras including sketches and a long, well written article by Stephen Bissette. Bissette also wrote the introduction in book 6 of the TBD but the one in the Absolute Edition is brand new. Oh, and the cheapo TPB’s used the original coloring and look better. *sigh* Maybe if enough people complain, DC will reverse course or possibly even redo the first version of the Absolute Edition. Probably not. Still, it was nice revisiting these stories and as far as I know the stories are entirely unaltered.

Could the early to mid-80s have been a finer time?As Watchmen waited in the wings, as "Whatever Happened to the Man from Tomorrow?" and "For the Man Who Has Everything" cooled, prior to Morrison's American debut with fourth-wall breaking postmodernism in "Animal Man," we always had Alan Moore's reinvention of "Swamp Thing," in those halcyon days prior to the grim days when the industry believed that Moore and Gibbons's magnum opus succeeded due to its mild sexual content or its often 'off the page' violence of a more graphic nature - as the great James 'Starman / JSA, Golden Age' Robinson has pointed out, the industry took the wrong message... it was Watchmen's complexity, its depth, which made it a game-changer in comics history - one, indeed, proceeded by Swamp Thing - an elegiac, even romantic book that didn't lack for mindblowing SF.Moore's save - as the title neared cancelation, it proved a perfect vehicle for Moore and his great art team... Steve Bissette, John Totleben, an initially uncredited Rick Veitch, who will helm the series later, letterer John Costanza, who makes individual voices breathe, and colorist Tatjana Wood, who got more out of pulp paper than anyone this side of Richmond Lewis in Batman: Year One. Of course, the absence of Ms. Wood in these II volumes (pardon, having received them both today after oft-reading them) I am excited and review - the book design here) may, indeed, engender controversy - a concern I had, until I received them, and showed my son. I concede, for this book design, the move to colorist Steve 'Miracleman' Oliff - simply works.Above all, the book is as raw, as vital, living, and organic as it ever was. In fact, these two absolute editions particularly impress with their higher-end production values, better than those on other fine absolute editions. Is the interior cover thread? Whatever the coating, it mimics moss with its tackiness. These production values represent less of a reinterpretation and more of a refining. The additions of Moore's promotional material (Volume 1) "This is the place" - a downright literary flexing of verbal muscle - is better than nice. The full script in volume II - look at Moore's novelistic description... truly he had the right art team in place... make both volumes shine., so now we have The Anatomy Lesson and American Gothic - once more. I am more than eager to revisit Moore's fine, romantic coda in Volume III.

Swamp Thing is such an interesting character to begin with. However, Alan Moore breaks all bounds with what his "roots" are and takes him to new and bold heights.The interior pages are remastered on a thicker cover stock. This new printing and substrate allows the colors to really standout and gives more depth and dynamics to this story. There was some musty charm in the duller quality of the previous editions being printed on a newspaper style paper, but this is like reading in HD.This thing is a tome, so it's not for light (in the literal sense) reading. It has some great supplimental materials at the end as well. It is well worth the extra money.I highly recommend!

An Absolute edition of one of the most important comics of the last 50 years but caveat emptor.First, the good points. There is a beautiful image on the slip case and the hardback itself has a nice textured cover which almost feels mossy in a highly appropriate fashion. Inside there is no introduction as it launches straight in to the Loose Ends story and continues on up to and including the Rites of Spring. Along the way the Down among the Dead Men story from the second Swamp Thing annual is included in the correct place.After that there are numerous sketches and concept art pieces mostly by John Totleben, as well as a lengthy and fascinating history of the genesis of their run on the title by Stephen Bissette. Alan Moore’s complete text for his “This is the place” essay which advertised the strip in a DC sampler issue is also included. It would have been nice to have something more from the great man but obviously that is unlikely to ever happen again.The paper is high quality and glossy and it is great to se the artwork blown up to Absolute size.But, and you knew this was coming, DC decided to get the artwork recoloured by Steve Oliff. This may have something to do with how the original colouring would have reproduced on glossy paper but the result is that it now looks like a completely different comic to the one I remember. Tatjana Wood’s beautiful colouring of the original series has been sadly discarded.I have attached photos which compare some of the pages to how they were printed in the last hardback collection from about 2012. In the double photographs the Absolute version is on the right hand side with some reflection from the glossy paper, the hardback version which I prefer is on the left. On the cover of the Anatomy Lesson issue #21 the recolouring seems to take Swamp Thing back to the green/grey smooth skinned creature of the Wein/Wrightson run instead of the shaggier and mossy green character He becomes in this issue. This is the first Absolute collection I have bought and my personal feeling is that I prefer how the art was reproduced in the earlier hardback editions. If I had done some more research in advance I think I would probably have saved the £50 and stuck with the smaller hardbacks and I don’t think I will be back for the second Absolute Swamp Thing.I am interested to learn more about DC’s decision to recolour their artwork and will be looking out for other reviews. In the meantime check out some of the artwork samples before you make your own decision about this purchase.

I have to add to the chorus of dissatisfaction with the new colouring.The original colours by the late, great Tatanja Wood were dark, earthy, organic and powerful. Alan Moore himself praised their contribution to the book’s visual aesthetic.They tied together a lot of the changes of artist teams and gave Swamp Thing a greater visual consistency.So while I can understand the need to re-engineer the colours for a larger, clearer, glossier format, I can’t understand why the original palate has been completely ignored, and the new digital colours look like wishy-washy watercolours.Otherwise the book’s terrific: seeing Bissette/Veitch/Totleben’s incredible art at this resolution is stunning, and in terms of writing it’s peerless.But I’ll be keeping my old hardbacks, for sure.

No-one seems to be having any criticism of the story or the art, so we'll skip past them.Being someone who's had previous releases going all the way back to the original comics, I found the new colouring job to really enrich the story. Yes, there were some pieces where I thought the choices were not what I thought they should be, but generally it was quite magnificent.Tatjana Wood's original colouring was very good, but it was constructed with the tools available at the time (and that was a long time ago). If today's tools (and printing) had been available then, I'm sure she would have made different choices. Instead, she worked brilliantly with the tools available.As long as it's done well (and this one generally is, in my opinion) I really like old material getting the benefits of the new techniques.

I love Absolute editions! I have many of them but the colouring of this one for me falls a bit flat. If this was the first time I’d seen the colours of this edition I don’t think I’d have cared, but I love preserving originality and artistic visions.Alan Moore’s Killing Joke had Brian Bollards intended colouring and the second colourists edition all in one book. The same could have been done for this book perhaps? New colour version and original?We pay a lot of money for these editions, is it wrong to expect perfection since these are meant to be the best of the best.If these get reprinted I won’t be happy because we’ve already bought this edition, there should be a swapping policy reprint (I doubt it will happen but whom knows??)The quality of the Absoute is beautiful as usual.Thick pages, lovely cover and binding.Just the colouring is edited.Bit of a shame.I’d still semi recommend it but keep your original comic books of Swamp Thing too.

Some people seem to be very unhappy about the recolouring, whereas I don’t mind it at all. I do see their point, like some of them I still have the original, so I can go back to them, though I doubt I would. This beautiful hardcover, with solid slipcase is beyond amazing. I bought it in the sale and was blown away by the quality. It looks great on my shelf too! Alan Moore class act.